When Rick Wright first took over as chairman back at the start of the 1990s the Bluebirds, then in the old Division Four, were meeting the likes of Hartlepool United, Rochdale and Leyton Orient in front of barely 3,000 fans at antiquated Ninian Park.

The Bluebirds, then in the old Division Four, were meeting the likes of Hartlepool United, Rochdale and Leyton Orient in front of barely 3,000 fans at antiquated Ninian Park.

They were close to following Newport County, Maidstone and Aldershot out of the Football League. Their very future, we were told, was at stake.

And then the revolution began. Kick-started by Wright, the solid foundations he put in place were built upon by Sam Hammam and Vincent Tan.

The upshot is the booming Bluebirds of 2012, the club the newer generation of supporters have so fondly come to know.

Those younger followers of the club won’t know too much about Rick Wright. Sadly, after yesterday’s news, unlike them, he won’t be around to see the Bluebirds in the Premier League, the hoped-for culmination of the work he first started.

But make no mistake, Wright was the forerunner of Cardiff’s success, the person who first set the ball rolling and created the current fan base which has seen the Bluebirds thriving.

Wright was a maverick, an eccentric, a man well ahead of his time ... also quite the most charismatic and amiable chairman I have known in the years I have been covering Welsh football.

And that’s saying something considering I’ve also regularly crossed paths with Hammam, Peter Ridsdale and the Swansea City duo of Dougie Sharpe and Steve Hamer.

When Wright first breezed into the Cardiff chairman’s hot-seat back in 1991, full of revolutionary new ideas, the words “marketing gimmick” sprang to mind.

With those huge Christopher Biggins-style spectacles covering his face, coupled with an ability to speak at 100 words a minute, the initial view was that he was just using Cardiff City FC to get publicity for the Barry Island Pleasure Park he owned.

How wrong those sceptics – yes, myself included – were.

Far from being wacky, Wright was a visionary, a marketing genius who dragged the football club from its uppers and sent it roaring into the modern era.

He had brilliant ideas which, to this day, have held Cardiff City in good stead.

Youngsters were let in for just £1, or even free. Where Wright led, other football clubs quickly followed.

He introduced a pay as you play scheme, whereby the price of match-day tickets were determined by the position of the Bluebirds in the table. The higher, the more expensive, the lower the cheaper. Again, other clubs quickly copied the idea.

He linked up with this newspaper to introduce a new Junior Bluebirds section, in doing so ensuring Cardiff possessed the biggest number of young season ticket holders in the whole of the UK.

He brought energy, endeavour and enthusiasm to the football club and city, his off-the-wall ideas ensuring headlines on even the back pages of the London-based tabloids.

Gimmicks? Anything but. Wright’s revolution worked. Oh how it worked.

The gates at Ninian Park quickly rose from 3,000 to 10,000-plus. Even though the Bluebirds were in the bottom division, we had attendances touching 20,000 to watch a game against Shrewsbury and another of 16,000 for the visit of little Barnet.

Wright inspired a whole new generation of fans to support their local football club, who in turn inspired the next generation.

The crowds have never dipped back to the bad old days pre-Wright. See what I mean about him being responsible for building up the current fan base? With their season-ticket money, transfer market funds have been released for Malky Mackay.

It was also during the Wright era that the Ayatollah became synonymous with Cardiff. Many is the time the chairman could be seen tapping his head with his hands – sometimes down on the pitch with his manager Eddie May – or posing for photographs with youngsters joining in the strange new ritual, which has these days become the norm.

The ‘Barmy Army’ chant, another thing taken as read today. also first began during the Wright-May era.

Newer fans, more accustomed to Craig Bellamy, Aaron Ramsey, Wembley and major cup finals, might struggle to comprehend this, but in a perverse sort of way those lower division days under Wright were even more magical for some older City followers.

Ratcliffe and Robbie were well past their best by then and only Blake, our brilliant Echo columnist, could be described as a top flight footballer in the making.

Yet some of those bottom division players, in particular Dale, Stant and Perry, will always be regarded as Cardiff City legends by the fans.

“Who needs Cantona when we’ve got Stant-ona,” roared the Bluebirds supporters, followed by ‘Psycho do the Ayotollah’ and chants about Blakey and fruit machines, which I diplomatically won’t go into.

Wright’s brilliant chairmanship ensured there was a new connection between the community and a football club which had struggled so horribly during the dark days of the 1980s.

Three home-grown Welsh youngsters – Blake, Perry and Searle – coming through the system and playing such a pivotal part helped bring the team and the public together as one.

Rick Wright made the people of Cardiff proud to support their football club again.

He wasn’t one for doing stiff-upper lip Boardroom talk. I recall the time when Wright tore a strip off Wrexham, a fellow Welsh club, after some of their fans racially abused Blake during a game up at the Racecourse.

Racism and football was something of a taboo subject at the time.

Wright was among the first to talk openly about such disgraceful scenes and in a manner any modern day Racial Equality organisation would have been proud of.

Football had to change, he decreed. How right he was again.

That doesn’t mean Wright didn’t make mistakes.

I recall sitting with him in his plush office overlooking the waterfront at Barry Island when he told me to print a story about him wanting to take Cardiff into the League of Wales.

He saw the Bluebirds, only a lower division side, back then, remember, becoming the Glasgow Celtic of Welsh football and playing for vast riches in the newly-formed UEFA Champions League every season.

“This is going to cause uproar,” I told Wright. “Your supporters will never buy into this. They would rather play Crewe and Colchester than Connah’s Quay and Cwmbran.”

The LoW was sponsored at the time by Konica. The critics sneered it was more like the Komical League.

Wright, talking at his usual 100 words a minute, then explained how commercially this would make sound business sense for the Bluebirds.

How meeting Barcelona, Manchester United and AC Milan in Europe would be worth the loss of a place in the English lower leagues.

Let’s just say we agreed to disagree on that one. Once the story was printed, the inevitable backlash began.

At first, Wright the visionary stuck to his guns. Very quickly, he realised this was actually a battle he could not win and, taking supporter opinion into account, quietly abandoned his ambitious, and equally preposterous, plan.

Like most Cardiff chairmen, Wright left the club in 1995 under something of a cloud and Cardiff went through the Kenny Hibbitt, Phil Neal, Russell Osman crash before Hammam brashly announced his arrival and took things onto another plateau.

But it’s fair to say that, just like Eddie May, Rick Wright will always be fondly remembered by Cardiff fans for the fresh dynamism he brought to their club.

Unlike Hammam, Ridsdale and Tony Clemo, Wright was never an out and out football person.

Like Vincent Tan, he spotted commercial opportunities with the Bluebirds and exploited them.

But like Tan, Cardiff City became ingrained in Rick Wright’s DNA.

So much so that, having emigrated to Australia in his old age, he always made a point of reading about the club’s fortunes on our website WalesOnline.

I’m told that the other Friday night, in his very fragile state, Wright was informed of the Bluebirds’ 4-1 thumping of Blackburn Rovers.

He gave a squeeze of the hand and broke into a huge smile on hearing they were still top of the table. Where he had taken the club a couple of decades earlier.

At least he bowed out in the knowledge the magnificent work he had started in the 1990s had not gone to waste.

WalesOnline is part of Media Wales, publisher of the Western Mail, South Wales Echo, Wales on Sunday and the seven Celtic weekly titles, offering you unique access to our audience across Wales online and in print.